Hello,
This is my 5th month in Vaud canton and 3rd since I started taking French lessons. All is well but there is one thing I can't get my head around about French: Gender of nouns. Why should any noun, table, chair, car, pen, door, etc, etc have a gender? Which purpose can it possibly serve?

Slightest insight is welcome.

Best regards
Can Yaver

I don't know but it has nothing to do with sex. Vagina in French is masculine! Trying to rationalise why a noun has one gender or another won't help. You just have to learn 'em.

to faciliate cross-pollination and/or inter-species shennanigans

i think one of the reasons may be, that gender or noun classes makes it much easier to avoid to repeatedly mentioning the same things by their proper terms, but by refer to them by pronouns.

i find that profoundly disturbing...

Why not? That is common in Latin languages and you also have differentiation in other languages like Dutch (with "Het" and "De").
What it does not have is a sex: I understand that in languages, the term gender is not synonymous with the term sex. Probably by having a gender it would be less likely to use the noun again instead of using a pronoun.
Having said that, gender is assigned arbitrarily; As far as I am aware there are no set of concrete rules that dictate whether a noun should be feminine or masculine. You may recognize by the way the word ends whether is one gender or the other.
Enjoy your discovery!

I wondered the same thing when I studied French years ago, but there is no rhyme or reason for ascribing gender to nouns/inanimate objects. It just is. Like Nev says, you just have to learn 'em.

There's a book called The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John McWorter, which is a comprehensive history of linguistics. The concept of gender, of course, is discussed, but still no real answers as to WHY.

At least in French it's only le and la. In German, you have der, die and das, and in some languages there are as many as 15 genders I'm not in a position to explain or elaborate as I'm still trying to figure that one out myself

The question was not about commonality among certain languages like Spanish or Italian. Plus this arbitrary assignment of gender implies the absence of a particular function.

I think you can safely group words together, in some cases, which have the same gender. For example, in French, anything ending in:

...ette or ...elle is feminine

And in German any words ending in

...chen is neuter
...ung is feminine

There are more examples but I can't remember them right now.

The question was not about tips for memorizing gender of nouns.

I think your just going to have to accept that this is the way it is, I think english is one of the few language were objects do not have a a gender in front of them, just learn the genders and eventually it won't be so odd.

This also freaked me out for ages until I realised that unless I was totally fluent, it doesn't really matter; nobody really cares if you call the table m or f, as long as you make the effort to speak the language....generally everybody seems totally forgiving on my French grammatical errors.
I have also sadly realised passing a couple of exams in French doesn't make you fluent either...

"Ship" is officially feminine, apparently.

Articles help differentiate singular and plural, and the genders might help to avoid mix-ups, too.

do the say "the person" in french like they do in german

fragemal der Gerold

ask the Gerold

I find this odd

But while we are discussing the subject of gender, and since you are learning French, why not? Even if you are not interested in such tips, others most certainly are.

I was only trying to demonstrate that it is not the actual "object" which is given a gender but, in many cases, the formation of the word. Obviously, for example, the table as an inanimate object has no feminine characteristics but the WORD itself falls into a category which can only be given a feminine gender of "la".

It's not correct in German, though it's commonly used in swiss German.

Same thing in Italian, it is wrong to put the article before a person's name, though it's used quite commonly in some italian dialects, especially in the north.

Even better in italian the table can have both genders "il tavolo" or "la tavola"

Are you german or swiss?

I am sure there is a more suitable thread or place to share these tips. What's more, I am not in a position to refuse this gender reality in French for advises like "like it or not, accept it" to have any relevance.